116 PEPACTON 



from which the sound proceeds, and it instantly 

 ceases, and you may watch for an hour without 

 again hearing it. Is it a frog, I said, the small 

 tree-frog, the piper of the marshes, repeating his 

 spring note, but little changed, amid the trees? 

 Doubtless it is, yet I must see him in the very act. 

 So I watched and waited, but to no purpose, till 

 one day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I heard 

 the sound proceed from beneath the leaves at my 

 feet. Keeping entirely quiet, the little musician 

 presently emerged, and, lifting himself up on a small 

 stick, his throat palpitated and the plaintive note 

 again came forth. " The queerest frog ever I saw, " 

 said a youth who accompanied me, and whom I had 

 enlisted to help solve the mystery. ISTo; it was no 

 frog or toad at all, but the small red salamander, 

 commonly called lizard. The color is not strictly 

 red, but a dull orange, variegated with minute 

 specks or spots. This was the mysterious piper, 

 then, heard from May till November through all 

 our woods, sometimes on trees, but usually on or 

 near the ground. It makes more music in the 

 woods in autumn than any bird. It is a pretty, 

 inoffensive creature, walks as awkwardly as a baby, 

 and may often be found beneath stones and old logs 

 in the woods, where, buried in the mould, it passes 

 the winter. (I suspect there is a species of little 

 frog — Pickering's hyla 1 — that also pipes occasion- 

 ally in the woods. ) I have discovered, also, that 



1 A frequent piper in the woods throughout the summer and 

 early fall. 



